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OK, you’ve got your hands on the ultra-cool new Hall of Fame baseball cards, Strat-O-Matic’s biggest set of great players ever. Now, how are you going to play them?

There’s dozens of possibilities for the imaginative gamer, but the 238 cards are not divided into teams. Relying on the old computer rosters for eight 24-man squads from the Hall of Fame 2000 set doesn’t account for 46 extra cards in this set. Adding the 18 major leaguers elected to the HOF since then to the HOF 2000 teams overloads the two post-war teams. And where are you going to place the 28 Negro Leaguers?

Fact is, the 24-man teams were already overloaded with lineup players, while having barely enough pitchers and catchers. In a league of superstars, Lou Brock, a man with 3,000 hits, was limited to being a pinch-runner. Brooks Robinson, once a Most Valuable Player, was a defensive replacement. Even big-bat guys like Paul Waner and Arky Vaughan were mostly pinch-hitters.

So the 28-man, 31-card Negro League set is far too formidable for one team in a “league” using most of these 238 cards. Eleven pitchers who each display stats of 180-290 innings pitched is about twice the innings a team needs to play a 154-game season.

The good news: The new cards in this set allow us to divide the full set differently. The HOF 2000 set mostly was divided into seven era teams (Old-Timers, Turn of the Century, Dead Ball, AL and NL Pre-War, AL and NL Post-War), with one very competitive group of “Left Outs” – players like Jimmie Foxx, Mickey Cochrane and Duke Snider – too good to sit behind their era contemporaries (Lou Gehrig, Bill Dickey, Willie Mays). The set could not be divided cleanly into franchises, because only the Yankees and Giants had all the positions covered.

Now, however, we can get closer to franchise teams with a bit of imagination. We’ll have the Yanks and Giants, and they will be potent. But so will teams representing Boston (Red Sox and Braves), Chicago (Cubs and White Sox), Philadelphia (Phillies and A’s) and St. Louis (Cardinals and Browns). We’ve got tougher decisions concerning Baltimore, Brooklyn/LA, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, Pittsburgh and Washington, plus the expansion teams.

But before we do this, we’ve got to decide on those Negro Leaguers. Do they form their own team(s), or do they further integrate the Major League franchises? The decision is critical, as you’ll soon see.

First, let’s work out what makes a team where all the players in the league were full-time players. We don’t need 25-man rosters, or 24.

A half dozen pitchers will cover the needed innings. Seven pitchers would be better, eight the max in a league where the pitching cards won’t complete many teams. Around the horn, we can get by with one catcher (two is better) because they are still scarce, a spare infielder or two, and a spare outfielder or two. In other words, 11 will get by, 12 is enough, 13 plenty. In all, teams of 17-21 cards should do nicely.

Now, about those Negro Leaguers. Those 28 men and 31 cards divide nicely into two geographical teams, North and South, but we’ll need a few more players from the Major League set to complete the playing rosters.

Using the booklet written by Negro Leagues researcher/consultant Scott Simkus that was distributed by Strat-O-Matic, we can find the primary team designations for each NL player. We’ll take the guys aligned with New York, Newark and Philly and put them in the North with players from the Midwest (Chicago Cinci, Cleveland, Detroit). The South team gets the players from a geographic “U” starting with Kansas City/St. Louis on the left, swinging low through Memphis and Birmingham and extending up on the right through Baltimore and Washington.

Love those versatile players, but we’re still a bit short. Only five pitchers in the North. Only one catcher in the South, where the 14 players include barely enough infielders and outfielders that include guys who sometimes are needed to pitch.

The solution? Bring back HOF Major Leaguers who began their careers in the Negro Leagues. The South gets all it needs with former Baltimore Elite Giants catcher Roy Campanella, former Birmingham Barons OF Willie Mays and former Kansas City Monarchs IF’s Jackie Robinson and Ernie Banks. That’s an 18-man team ready for anybody. If anything, it’s too loaded with choosing between Campanella and Gibson at catcher and between Banks and Wells at shortstop.

The North has star power, too, with former Indianapolis Clowns OF Hank Aaron and former Newark Eagles stars Larry Doby and Monte Irvin. [NOTE: In Newark, Doby and Irvin were middle infielders, converted to outfielders in the Major Leagues.]

This 19-man team is locked and loaded but still would lack a pitcher. Where to find him? From the original Negro Leagues set? From a 1950s set that included former Negro League pitcher Don Newcombe? Either way would taint the purity of a league consisting only of Hall of Famers. There are three black HOF major leaguers – Bob Gibson, Ferguson Jenkins and Juan Marichal. None were Negro Leaguers. Gibson, from Omaha and pitching for St. Louis, doesn’t fit the North well. Jenkins’ big-league career started considerably later than the Negro Leagues. Marichal, who started earlier, was a Giant, and would join fellow Hispanics DiHigo and Torriente in the North, seems the best fit.

But what a controversy this allocation would cause! Kidnap Mays and Marichal from the Giants? Pilfer Aaron from the Braves? Taking Campanella from the Dodgers would remove their only catcher.

There will be other tough calls on how to assign players who did well with two different franchises. We’ll resolve some of those by putting them on teams that need them the most to complete a playable roster. But this is why we need to decide how to use the Negro Leaguers before going much further.

This is a nice eight-team league with the two Negro League squads, but it still leaves many, many all-time greats (Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, Cy Young, Sandy Koufax, Walter Johnson, Satchel Paige) on the shelf.

It’s going to take some creativity to stick to the geographic theme. Detroit and Pittsburgh lack catchers and pitchers. Cincinnati has the catching, but no pitching. Cleveland has the pitching and outfielders, but no catcher and lacks corner infielders. The Dodgers have pitching, but are very thin positionally. Baltimore and Washington can’t go it alone.

In many cases, we will have to borrow from the teams above and/or dismantle the two Negro League teams. We may also have to use expansion-team players (Gary Carter, Tony Gwynn, Nolan Ryan, etc.) as wild-card roster supplements without a geographic fit. For instance:

Well, that leaves us with two franchises – Detroit and Pittsbugh – that have strong nuclei, but both lack pitching and catching, so they are not complementary. There are some great spare parts, however, from a Negro Leagues breakup (notably, Oscar Charleston and the pitching from the Kansas City Monarchs) and from unaccounted-for Major League expansion players – catcher Gary Carter, 3B George Brett and SS/OF Robin Yount.

For the record, here are the possibilities for the Tigers and Pirates:

Catcher Gary Carter could be assigned arbitrarily to Pittsburgh or Detroit. SS Yount would be needed more in Detroit. 3B Brett isn’t needed much on either team. Wouldn’t the long-time Kansas City Royals player be a fun addition to the Negro League South team with all their Kansas City Monarchs?

Unaccounted for on any of these teams if there is a Negro League breakup: